Ensuring that all pupils develop fluency with additive facts involves a significant commitment in terms of the development of school systems, teachers’ professional knowledge, effective teaching strategies, and the use of effective materials. This community offers schools that have previously engaged in Mastering Number at Reception and KS1 continued support to embed the programme in their school. It also supports Year 3 teachers to build on pupils’ prior learning by using centrally produced teaching materials to secure pupils’ fluency.
The 2020 DfE primary mathematics guidance for the national curriculum in England includes ready-to-progress criteria relating to additive facts within 10 for Years 1 and 2, and within 20 for Year 3, and states that: ‘It is essential that pupils have automatic recall of these facts before they learn the formal written methods of columnar addition and subtraction.’ This project supports teachers to ensure that pupils do develop factual fluency, in such a way that they do not become reliant on counting processes to calculate.
Maths leads in schools involved in the project will receive support to embed Mastering Number as a permanent element of their school's curriculum. They will collaborate with other maths leads in an online community and attend sessions offered by the Maths Hub. Maths leads will attend two central, online sessions, one in each of the autumn and spring terms; these will have a particular focus on how to support Year 3 teachers to use the teaching materials provided for pupils in KS2.
The materials will help teachers understand and embed the strategies for additive calculations that pupils have been introduced to in KS1. They will include key representations, such as the rekenrek, that support pupils to see the structure of the maths. The Year 3 teacher in participating schools will teach a 10-15 minute fluency session, four days a week, using the teaching materials provided. These sessions are additional to the main maths lesson.
Participating schools will have an opportunity to develop a consistent approach to the development of pupils’ fluency, and a deeper understanding of the progression in the learning of additive facts. Teachers will be supported to embed Mastering Number within their school, so that all pupils are encouraged to develop mathematical learning behaviours, talk about their ideas, and use a reasoning approach to the learning of additive facts. As a result, pupils will develop and secure fluency with additive facts within 20; this will support them with all future calculations, including when applying additive facts to derive multiplication facts.
